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Avebury's Block Faces
I have suspected for a long time that a very important Avebury character was a rather rectangular or "block" faced spirit or deity. You can see this face all over the site, at various scales and orientations. My discovery of a particularly wonderful example on Stone 98 confirmed this intuition, and I have been stunned by the precision with which the block face has been repeated on some of the very largest or commanding Avebury monoliths. Below I show particularly good examples of the form, the faces on A and C are orientated as in life, but B has been flipped and rotated to enable easy and fair comparison.
Taken together these three images prove that the Avebury monoliths were carved, there is no natural explanation for the exactly repeated shapes. They are also great examples to show how the Avebury sculptors were obsessed with working with monolithic silhouettes, and not just carvings on elevations.
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